On This Day: Your History

[ER]

April 27, 1990 Still two months from her driver’s license, Dana hired a cab to take us to the mall, and at Spencer’s she picked up a t-shirt for eleven-year-old me and went, "This would be so cute on you!" I believed everything she told me, so when she bought me the shirt and said to put it on in the restroom, I did. Long story short, I walked around the mall wearing it, and later went over to her friend’s and she kept drawing attention to my shirt, and when she did her friends would snicker. Now, I may have been slow out of the gate but I started clueing-in to the fact there was something about the shirt I wasn't grasping, though I couldn't put my finger on exactly what, since it was just a plain white tee with a cartoonish bikini-clad bird on it, captioned: "I'm Hornier Than A Hoot Owl." It was hours before anyone took mercy on me and explained.

[Alex]

28th April 2015.

I decided to be a supportive husband this morning, but it all went wrong somehow. Kristi was upset about something and I tried to find out what was wrong. She told me she didn't understand something and was feeling confused. In order to help her, I patted her on the head and said "Its ok honey, you are a woman. It is perfectly natural."

Somehow this resulted in me making breakfast. I've yet to figure out where things went wrong. Chicks huh? Just this morning I got into trouble for using logic to help Kristi, and being overly cheerful first thing in the morning.

28th April 2018.

With her family over for Ash's modified christening, we all went down to Edinburgh. Since they are a very nerdy family we took them places like the cafe where Harry Potter was born, since they love Disney, we also had to take them to Greyfriars, and of course my favourite pub, Frankensteins.

28th April 2019.

I went on a trip to Morayvia, the local aircraft museum. I didn't go because I have any particular passion for aircraft. They are simply something I work on. It did, however, mean I was not working in the office for a day, and a day without working beside Jim was a worthy endeavour. I enjoyed the day as much as anyone can enjoy these things and I would go back again to show Ash it.

[ER]

April 28, 2006 Never learning from past incidents, two days earlier I dove to make a return on the tennis court and bruised my ribs spectacularly. Nothing was broken but it hurt when I moved or sat still, breathed or blinked. I still went out that night to an all-Rachmaninoff concert ‘neath the massive 1870s confines of Music Hall, and when we came back Landon lingeringly brushed my hair for me, something that has given me a floaty, ASMR feeling for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t sleep though---what else was new?—and read Byron poems, which despite being good do sometimes cure insomnia, though I had the bad luck to come across this one, that struck me as eerie:

And thou art dead, as young and fair
As aught of mortal birth;
And form so soft, and charms so rare,
Too soon return'd to Earth.
Though Earth receiv'd them in her bed,
And o'er the spot the crowd may tread
In carelessness or mirth,
There is an eye which could not brook
A moment on that grave to look.

There’s nothing quite like a reminder that you’re one day going to lie eternally insensate to make you not want to sacrifice the time you have by sleeping.

[ER]

April 29, 1999 In retrospect, if there’s a key to getting anywhere in the long-term with me, it might be patience. Landon met me in 2001, hung in there, and ultimately married me a mere eight and a half years later. Back in the late-‘90s a very nice boy named Greg played a similar game and ended up owning a place in my elsewhere-focused affections. Well, that weekend Greg’s eleven-year-old half-sister Diana was visiting him and when he had to work, he asked if she could hang with me. She and I rented the estrogen-oozing How To Make An American Quilt, and after that I took her to a notorious canal said to have influenced Stephen King’s IT, where we made wishes and threw in pennies while speculating on what might’ve been the most shocking thing under the surface. (Lore had it that during WWII a local black market abortionist used to dispose of human remains in the canal, and a pistol linked to a double murder had turned up a few years before when a man was magnet fishing.) Later we went to a store to grab dinner and there was Phantom Menace merchandise everyplace you looked, including a seven-foot tall cardboard cutout of Darth Maul. When the store manager made it clear it was neither for sale nor could we call dibs on it since he was contractually-obligated to destroy it on June 30th, Diana and I contemplated grabbing it and dashing off. In the end we didn’t, but I admit, Bad Goofy was orating most eloquently on my left shoulder.

[Alex]

29th April 2010.

I spent the day studying fast erection sequences. Given the previous day, I'd to study flange chaffing, I was starting to wonder if I was on a technical course, or just being expertly trolled by a sex pest. Still, in the practical exam, I managed not to tighten the nuts too much. Despite the lovely weather I was not enjoying being in Norfolk, a place that were you to draw a relief map of, you'd have a blank piece of paper.

29th April 2013.

The MOD decided on a campaign to promote testicular cancer awareness. Given the general sense of humour in the military, it was a terrible idea to get someone to dress up in a giant, pink, phallus shaped foam rubber costume and call him Private Parts. To this day I shudder to think of what they did to that poor man.

29th April 2015.

I decided to abandon the party that had received my vote in 90% of the previous elections and switch to a smaller party, much less likely to get into power, but one which was more closely aligned to my political views.

29th April 2018.

Today was Ash's blessing. I forwent my usual black outfits and went all white instead because while I might be a bad guy to the rest of the world, for him I was going to be something different. Kristi was slightly surprised that the church didn't burst into flames when I stepped inside, although I didn't tell her why. Representatives from both sides of Ash's family travelled up here to attend, possibly making her church the busiest it had ever been, boosted further by some religiously inclined people from my work.

[ER]

April 30, 2017 Had a day out with Tyler, Dana’s seventeen year old son, whom I partly raised and loved very much. It was an almost perfect vernal afternoon and I first took him to see a display of Edo Period Japanese armor and weapons, and considering his prolific romantic life, asked if he’d ever made out in a museum, and when he said no, I said, “Then I still gotcha on something at least.” Which made him blush as only the pale blond can.
 
We went into 19th century Eden Park after the exhibit, passing a gazebo where a bootlegger once gunned down his wife, and chased lizards amid stone walls, then entered Krohn Conservatory, a huge Art Nouveau greenhouse where he and I used to go when he was little. He still knew the significance of the Herbert Hoover plaque atop the steep hillside above Krohn, where in his boyhood I’d carry him, and he’d grip me and say, “Don’t let go!”

At the top I’d always read the plaque, and tell him that once a President and a Governor and a Mayor stood on that spot, then in one of our traditions, we’d go to the hilltop overlook and see the river and throw old tennis balls and watch them bounce into the woods hundreds of feet down.
 
Before we came home we had a far-ranging conversation over chilled green tea with tapioca pearls, and he said our day out had been a nice break from the stress of his impending high school graduation, and I said I was glad, and told him about my last weeks of high school, remembering the whirlwind of sensation, his grandmother, my Aunt Judith, mad at me for declining to go to a university she’d helped me get into, and also thinking I was something of a slut for moving in with a man before I was even out of twelfth grade. (Nevermind that we’d been together almost a quarter of my life.)

“She always says you were put on this planet to make her mad,” Tyler told me.

He was leaving for Argentina in a few weeks to see his ex-pat sister and was toying with the idea of moving to Portland, Oregon, it being hip like Austin had been when I was his age, and it made me wonder if that would be it for him and me. It ultimately wasn’t, he would even live with us soon, but wondering so made that sweet afternoon almost painfully poignant.

[ER]

May 1, 2018 I was on the phone with my friend Clare when her dad called to report that her paternal grandmother had died at age eighty-nine. Clare never knew either of her grandparents, because they disinherited and shunned her father for dropping out of college and the medical school path they’d laid out for him, when he married Clare’s mom, who was pregnant with her brother. I talked to her dad later that day and while he told me he’d “resolved” all his pain over his mother long before, I knew it had to have been hard to lose even an estranged parent. When I was a teenager and mad at my own mom for splitting up with my dad and going to Ireland, Joe used to tell me I shouldn’t take having a mom for granted, and shared his own situation with me and said it was not a complete life without family in it. When I called to express my condolences at his loss, I asked if he was going to go to his mother’s funeral, and he said, “No, I’m not, and I’m not sure my father would welcome me if I wanted to. He and my mother didn’t come to my son’s service either, though I reached out to them.” Me, I think I’d rather chop off my right hand than be estranged from my own children, and the situation with Joe’s parents/Clare’s grandparents left me thinking what utterly horrible human beings they must’ve been.

[ER]

May 2:
1991: Up high enough to fall to my death, I went on his roof with my grandpa while he replaced shingles, impressed I wanted to come. He used to say I was fearless.
1992: Stopped at an estate sale and found a bar of 1930s Royal Soap that still smelled nice.
1994 For several years my mom took evening art classes and I’d often go with her to hang out on campus. This was the last night we ever did that together.
1997 After school I drove to Arlington Memorial Gardens and sat on a stone wall near where this girl named Dawn Sissie Baugh was buried. I didn’t know her, she was half a generation older than me, but her mother kept a graveside notebook in a plastic bag and had been writing to her for almost a decade, encouraging others to read and add if they wanted, a form of grief therapy for her. Being in a cemetery made me feel connected to my place in time.
2001: My Aunt Christie’s church did a massive helium balloon launch with quotes from Pope John Paul II tied on them. Some would go sixty miles.
2002: Bob Larson was in town and my friend Mandy tried to talk me into going with her while she pretended to be possessed, so she could spit on him. I told her that was low-class.
2005: Went to Clare’s bachelorette party, even though I hate the concept. There was a stripper from Columbia to whom genetics had been kind, and I watched otherwise placid women become squealing hedonists. Drove Clare back and we stayed up all night talking.
2007: Updated my will and left everything to Tyler. It would stay that way til Daisy was born.
2014: The joy I felt at my mother in law going home after a week with us went all the way to eleven.
2015: Drove Daisy to get a comic book for International Free Comic Day, and the proprietor was so resentful about the giveaway he griped about how she better appreciate it.
2017: Took the family hiking at Clifty Falls State Park, in Indiana. Cool place.

[Alex]

2nd May 2014.

I came very close to spending $3000 on a T-Rex skull for my mancave wall. I had the money to buy it, but it would have been all of my holiday spending money and I had to (reluctantly) pass on it. We took Mason and Bella out to the zoo and Utah's natural history museum. Kristi was still volunteering me to look after multiple special needs children at the same time, but never volunteered herself (she'd volunteer me for a lot of things this way), and while my resentment about this was building up, it would still be a while before I'd get angry enough about it to put my foot down and say no more. It was a good day generally, although I was on edge because, well frankly, even at a young age I could see Bella was an incipient psychopath. We'd caught her shoplifting earlier on that week (luckily before the store did), and she was hurting her sisters (including sneaking into their rooms after their birthdays and destroying all their toys). She also has an IQ they can't measure for her age. I hate to think of the rough time her dad must be having with her almost a decade on as she goes through her teenage years. Mason is just regular ADHD, but both of them behaved perfectly while they were out with us.

2nd May 2013.

Kristi was due to arrive in the UK toda. I'd had a dream that night about going to the airport and finding Herman Goering's body at the far end of the runway. The day went much smoother than that though. I had my friend Sean housesit as our bed was supposed to be delivered this day. We also had a prearranged signal, and I let him know when we were entering our street. He hid in the hall cupboard, and when Kristi walked in the house he jumped out, giving her a fright as her welcome to the UK.

[ER]

May 3, 2010 Though the undertaking would have been anathema to a younger me, in the wake of terrifying news weeks earlier, I discovered that I could find comfort in turning to God. For probably the first time I pondered accounts of Jesus returning from the dead, and tried to think about these claims from every facet. I considered what if Jesus was deceased and his body cast into a trash heap, or what if he was alive when taken down off the cross and Romans were bribed to let him go, and I thought of what if it was all a story made up centuries later, deifying a backwoods preacher? Yet I kept finding reasons for feeling every scenario but one was disproven, so that in the end I stood frozen in the realization that the best explanation for the stories of Jesus rising from the dead seemed to be that he actually did. If nothing else, what short of a miracle could have turned his followers from men who ran away when Jesus was arrested, to individuals who told the world they’d seen the risen Christ, and held onto that conviction at the cost of their own lives? If it hadn’t been true, why would they have been willing to step into hardships, and even die for their claims? I admit I have had varying degrees of spiritual dedication since that day, but one thing I have not waivered on is that I still feel as convinced by the weight of evidence for the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection as I did exactly thirteen years ago when I first found grounds for believing in it.

[Alex]

3rd May 2013.

Decided for her first day in Scotland Kristi required a little spoiling, so a long lie (with massage and shoulder rub) in was followed by a traditional Scottish breakfast (eggs, bacon and tattie scones although since she had never had them before I gave her Scotch eggs rather than fried), with a glass of apple & mango juice (and no, I didn't forget to put a flower on the tray either). Ran her a nice hot bubble bath after which I decided since it was a nice day a walk down to the promenade and beach was required.

[ER]

May 4:
1995: Dana was glum about having to visit her grandparents in Alabama, so I suggested she tell them this joke:  “What do maggots and Crimson Tide football fans have in common? They can both live a long, long time off a dead bear.”
1996: My dad came home from Washington DC and brought me a paper clip. I wasn’t impressed til he told me whose office he stole it from.
1997: As Brian and I drove to see Austin Powers he wanted to play Tupac’s Me Against The World, explaining: “You’ve heard Jagged Little Pill a hundred times.” I said, “Yeah, ‘You Oughta Know’ was starting to give me weird urges in theaters.” He replied, “101 times it shall be…”
2002: Before we picked her up to go to the Kentucky Derby with us, I told Landon my friend Gina was a twenty-five-year-old virgin, and he said he couldn’t decide if that was admirable or sad. I told him I always went with the first one since she was pretty. He kept looking at Gina funny the rest of the day. I don’t care how many times a man says virgins do nothing for him, virgins do something for him.
2012 When Rob told me he’d stood in line all day to be among the first to see The Avengers, I told him he was an “adultlescent.” I meant it as a compliment.
2020: Had my “witch’s mark” birth mark removed from my shoulder without anesthesia. (Because sod pain.) It was like losing an old friend. I asked if I could take it home in a jar, and they said no, so I thought about looking for it in the dumpster out back.
2022: Amber Heard’s constant talking to the jury instead of the lawyers annoyed me, so I kept throwing a Nerf ball at her face.

[ER]

May 5, 2017 My husband and I watched Bambi with our children, who had never seen it, and oh, boy, tear city! I told the children that when I was little Dana used to tell me our deer hunting grandpa was the one who shot Bambi’s mother, making my son burst out asking: “HE SHOT BAMBI’S MOM????” Landon told them actually Sarah Palin shot her, and he found a parody video Conan O’Brien did that made it look like she did, but the joke was ultimately on Landon because none of our offspring had clue who Sarah Palin was. How I envied them….

[ER]

May 6, 2021 Ever had an experience where out of nowhere a realization suddenly overloads you? Well that day as I was listening to my dear friend Clare tell me about how her dad was going to take her and my godson on a trip to Florida, I was abruptly hit by the memory of one of her dad’s gratuitously-shared stories from his drug abuse days, when he was a young sales guy, getting rich and living on top of a world he thought would never end. While he was married to Clare and Brian’s mom in the mid-‘80s, he went to a convention in Florida and hooked up with a hot saleswoman, and ended up snorting a ring of cocaine from around her nipple. OK, not earth-shaking, this was a long time ago, he’s not that man anymore, but the point was I knew things about her father I’m sure ever-adoring Clare didn’t, and that fact suddenly felt too awkward. I thought how insanely connected I had been with her family for most of my life---her brother, her parents, her, her son---and all the private things I knew about each of them which the others likely did not know, and which they in turn knew about me, and it was like this unfiltered awareness assailed me, pulling the air out of my lungs. For a second it was just too much.

[ER]

May 7, 1994 I won a two-set match, 7-5, 6-2 when the other girl didn’t have the conditioning to hold it together in the second set. Many tennis players didn’t seem to grasp how important stamina was, but I focused on it.

Went home, got ready, eschewed makeup, and Dana came and took me to her dad, my Uncle Lark’s, annual Kentucky Derby party, which he held on his hobby farm on the northernmost cusp of the Bluegrass region about an hour and a half south of where we lived.

Her dad called me Ellie Two Shoes, as he had since I was little, and hugged me hello, as did his extremely pretty second wife, Mella, who had grown up on Antigua. (Uncle Lark liked to say, “I did good for a Catholic boy from Alabama!”) He was in a partnership that owned radio stations around the country, something still possible back then before the big conglomerates bought up every market, and it was through that connection that he had famous guests there from politics, sports, and entertainment. Dana, who was more used to being around the noteworthy, told me the only way to handle it was to not be any different toward celebrities than you would anybody else. “Be polite but don’t stare, and never drool.”

That day was the first time I ever had jalapeno poppers, which I discovered I really liked, and Dana made me take a swig of her mint julep, which made me gag so hard I almost saw those poppers a second time.
 
We watched the race (blink and you’d miss it) on a massive screen in this shelter house Uncle Lark had erected, and a horse named Go for Gin won, though that night in my diary I mistakenly wrote his name as “Gopher Gin” since that’s how I’d heard it pronounced.

Dana was staying late and was way too drunk to drive me home, so when he found out I was going to call my mom for a ride, Uncle Lark paid for me to take a taxi all the way back to Mason, Ohio, and I have no idea how much that cost him, but at almost a hundred miles it couldn’t have been cheap.

What a day!